These upper hand quotes will inspire you. Upper hand, the position of having power or being in control in a particular situation.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging upper hand quotes, upper hand sayings, and upper hand proverbs.
Best Upper Hand Quotes
- “The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.” ~ Anton Chekhov
- “I’d go dance at talent shows, and because I was young I had the upper hand on a lot of other crews. People thought it was cute. I used that to my advantage.” ~ Jermaine Dupri
- “It’s funny how the hippies and the punks tried to get rid of the conservatives, but they always seem to get the upper hand in the end.” ~ Bjork
- “There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.” ~ T. S. Eliot
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“In the absence of evidence to the contrary, always assume you have the upper hand.” ~ Ronnie Montrose
- “In fighting a bull you’re always aware of a paradox concerning your perceptions of the bull. On the one hand it’s your perceptions of the bull that give you the upper hand. You read the bull, you learn to read the bull more and more accurately, and this reading of the bull is how you deploy your intelligence against the bull’s intelligence. Your accuracy in reading the bull is a weapon, maybe your most important weapon, against all the bull’s weapons. On the other hand, you’re human, you have the human tendency to read into the bull things which may not actually be there.” ~ Bette Ford
- “In control. Out of control. Sometimes they’re the same thing. The trick is knowing that, realizing it’s okay to feel out of control once in a while, as long as you’re sure you can regain the upper hand when you absolutely need to.” ~ Ellen Hopkins
- “There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain; if a man escapes these, boredeom lies in wait for him at every corner. Nay more; it is evil which generally has the upper hand, and folly that makes the most noise. Fate is cruel and mankind pitiable.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
- “There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?” ~ W. Somerset Maugham
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“And wonder, dread and war have lingered in that land where loss and love in turn have held the upper hand.” ~ Simon Armitage
- “A democracy is a state in which the poor, gaining the upper hand, kill some and banish others, and then divide the offices among the remaining citizens equally, usually by lot.” ~ Plato
- “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” ~ Herman Melville
- “Most leaders would agree that they’d be better off having an average strategy with superb execution than a superb strategy with poor execution. Those who execute always have the upper hand.” ~ Stephen Covey
- “Women are quite unlike men. Women have higher voices, longer hair, smaller waistlines, daintier feet and prettier hands. They also invariably have the upper hand.” ~ Stephen Potter
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“Intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
- “Fifteen minutes later I was an expert. That’s all you need. I think I was even getting the upper hand, which is very simple with a guy. Anything seems to turn them on.” ~ Melina Marchetta
- “The workplace has become a psychological battlefield and the millennials have the upper hand, because they are tech savvy, with every gadget imaginable almost becoming an extension of their bodies. They multitask, talk, walk, listen and type, and text. And their priorities are simple: they come first.” ~ Morley Safer
- “Politically speaking, you don’t necessarily give away information that allows your enemy to get an upper hand. But at the same time you don’t keep reality from the population.” ~ Dwight Schultz
- “A comfort zone can be a mental state:Belief in God is a lot of peoples’s comfort zone. Dont get me wrong, I’m not knocking faith; I just dont think you should have it because it makes you feel safe. I think you should have it because you do. Because somewhere deep inside you, you know beyond equivocating that something greater, wiser and infinitely more loving than we’re capable of understanding has a vested interested in the universe, in the way things turn out. Because you can feel that, as much as the forces of darkness might try to gain the upper hand, there is an Upper Hand.” ~ Karen Marie Moning
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“The Stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand, To prove the Upper Classes, Have still the Upper Hand.” ~ Noel Coward
- “And yet, we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in … tiresome acrobatics. … Flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step. … When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit.” ~ Katherine Anne Porter
- “I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don’t get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time…The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give up.” ~ C. S. Lewis , Get the upper hand quotes
- “It is better to have a cat and mouse game where the cat has the upper hand than a cat and mouse game where the mice are ruling. Because the latter means that the market participants are given free range. That was actually the big misconception of our national hero Ronald Reagan, who always talked about the magic of the market.” ~ George Soros
- “Guests can be, and often are, delightful, but they should never be allowed to get the upper hand.” ~ Elizabeth von Arnim
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“I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas.” ~ Tahir Shah
- “The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it’s an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it’s the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment.” ~ Sufjan Stevens
- “Today we’re seeing fundamental conflicts within political Islam, with the fundamentalists on the one side and the moderates on the other. Who gains the upper hand means a great deal to the world.” ~ Zalmay Khalilzad
- “I remember being in the audition with Mark [Duplass] and I remember not being able to dominate him. He’s so smart and centered and grounded. I can’t do what I’d normally do to someone in this situation. I can’t get the upper hand in the scene. I was really impressed and excited about the possibility to work with him.” ~ Jackie Schaffer
- “I can only hope that Trump comes to realize the grave dangers of adopting a policy of confrontation toward Iran. Among these dangers is the likelihood that hardliners would again gain the upper hand in the governing process in Tehran, and the moderates who have sought to end national and regional tensions would be marginalized, or worse.” ~ Richard A. Falk
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“The upper hand is with those who are pushing regime change rather than those who are advocating more diplomacy.” ~ Richard N. Haass
- “Hundreds upon hundreds of news outlets – okay, thousands – are interested in following the happenings at the White House. Yet the number of news sources at the White House – people who know what’s happening – is finite. Dozens maybe. With that imbalance hanging over the enterprise, it’s hard for a group of reporters competing against one another to secure the upper hand.” ~ Erik Wemple
- “The press is hostile to Donald Trump, they always will be. And Donald Trump is happy to return the favor. And you know what, he actually has the upper hand in that relationship.” ~ Ari Fleischer
- “The one who decides who goes ahead has the upper hand, regardless of who gets to go. This is why many women do not feel empowered by such privileges as having doors held open for them. The advantage of going first through the door is less salient to them than the disadvantage of being granted the right to walk through a door by someone who is framed, by his magnanimous gesture, as the arbiter of the right-of-way.” ~ Deborah Tannen
- “Nothing, that is say no one, can be such an inexorable tour-conductor as one’s own conscience or sense of duty, if one allows either the upper hand: the self-bullying that goes on in the name of sight-seeing is grievous.” ~ Elizabeth Bowen
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“Exoticism can give you an edge: it makes people assume you’re cleverer than you are and gives you the upper hand.” ~ Kristin Scott Thomas
- “In this world, man has two significant possessions: intelligence and emotion. These two possessions govern our day-to-day life. But very often we see that emotion (ego) gets the upper hand in our life. We know that even if someone is extremely intelligent, when his emotion comes to the fore it will devour him. He is compelled to do what his emotion asks him to do.” ~ Sri Chinmoy
- “My position as regards the monied interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run, identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand; for property belongs to man and not man to property.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “Throughout the history of mankind there have been murderers and tyrants; and while it may seem momentarily that they have the upper hand, they have always fallen. Always.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” ~ Karl Marx
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“It is frankly a mistake of amateurs to believe you can gain the upper hand in a diplomatic negotiation.” ~ Henry A. Kissinger
- “Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one’s work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one’s readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.” ~ John Galsworthy
- “We Communists have got to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their agriculture and their technology. But we are going to continue massive military programs. . . (soon) we will be in a position to return to a much more aggressive foreign policy designed to gain the upper-hand.” ~ Leonid Brezhnev
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“It’s the first company to build the mental position that has the upper hand, not the first company to make the product. IBM didn’t invent the computer; Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect’s mind.” ~ Al Ries
- “There’d been studies over the years supporting the proposition that groups composed exclusively of women usually made intelligent decisions, that exclusively male groups did a bit less well, and that mixed groups did most poorly of all, by a substantial margin. It appeared that, when women were present, testosterone got the upper hand and men took greater risks than they might otherwise. Correspondingly, women in the mixed group tended to revert to roles, becoming more passive, and going along with whatever misjudgment the males might perpetrate.” ~ Jack McDevitt
- “I remember asking one of the [cyber experts], I said, “Knowing what you know, and you exist behind the curtains so to speak, and you see behind the curtain, do you look at the world differently? Do you feel you have an upper hand?” He just started laughing and said, “Man, people have no idea how exposed they are, how vulnerable, and what’s possible.”” ~ Chris Hemsworth
